‘Anthem’ Shuts Down January 12th And, Poof!, There Goes All That Creative Culture
from the broken-promises dept
When I get on my little soapbox and begin preaching about the importance of video game preservation, particularly when it comes to publishers shutting down servers required to play the game, I often get as a response a dismissal of games as not important enough to worry about. That sentiment is plainly wrong on many levels, of course. When it comes to art, no one person or group of people get to determine what is important culture and what isn’t. At the present, video games are also a massive cultural force in art and entertainment, with the quality and artistic nature of games having never been higher. And, finally, the bargain that copyright law is supposed to be, where a limited monopoly is granted in exchange for the art it covers eventually going into the public domain, isn’t subject to anyone’s subjective thoughts as to what artforms are important and what isn’t.
When games disappear, that is culture disappearing. When no effort is made to preserve this art, either directly or by prematurely freeing the art into the public domain, that breaks the copyright bargain. The publisher got the monoploy, but the public doesn’t get their end of the deal. Honestly, none of the above should be terribly controversial.
I’m going to try to innoculate against a derivative of all of that for this post by saying the following: it also doesn’t matter if the art that comprises a video game quality is even any good, or if the public generally thinks it’s good. And that brings me to the news that Bioware’s Anthem game will become unplayable next week.
We’ll admit that we weren’t paying enough attention to the state of Anthem—BioWare’s troubled 2019 jetpack-powered open-world shooter—to notice EA’s July announcement that it was planning to shut down the game’s servers. But with that planned server shutdown now just a week away, we thought it was worth alerting you readers to your final opportunity to play one of BioWare’s most ambitious failures.
While active development on Anthem has been dormant for years, the game’s servers have remained up and running. And though the game didn’t exactly explode in popularity during that period of benign neglect, estimates from MMO Populations suggest a few hundred to a few thousand players have been jetpacking around the game’s world daily. The game also still sees a smattering of daily subreddit posts, including some hoping against hope for a fan-led private server revival, a la the Pretendo Network. And there are still a small handful of Twitch streamers sharing the game while they still can, including one racing to obtain all of the in-game achievements after picking up a $4 copy at Goodwill.
Was Anthem any good? I have no idea; I have never played it. My comrade in arms, Karl Bode, mentioned to me that he really liked it. Having discussed video games with Karl for several years, that’s mostly good enough for me. Still, let’s say it was trash. It certainly wasn’t a success by industry standards in terms of sales. And none of that matters.
Bioware could have done several things to make this not a story about the pure disappearance of culture. It chose not to do so. There was no working with fans to cheaply or freely license some fan-run servers. No release of source code. Nothing in the reasonably short list of demands the folks that run the Stop Killing Games campaign have if we’re going to let these shutdowns continue. It’s just… gone.
If there’s one thing that is true in art and culture, it certainly must be that we learn absolutely as much from failure as success. From bad art as much as good art. From the niche as much as the wildly popular. But in cases like Anthem, class is cut short and the learning largely stops because it all just vanishes into the ether. A whisp of cultural smoke disappearing into the sky.
And I keep coming back to the copyright bargain. The public is being shortchanged on what it is owed. If this were music we were talking about, or literature, that suddenly vanished from the universe simply because a record label or publisher decided to disappear it, there would be outrage. The same should be true for the gaming industry.
It shouldn’t be that Bioware can at once benefit from copyright law to make money and leave it such that this same law prevents the art from ever entering the public domain.
Filed Under: anthem, copyright, stop killing games, video game preservation, video games
Companies: bioware
Comments on “‘Anthem’ Shuts Down January 12th And, Poof!, There Goes All That Creative Culture”
So what’s the alternative you’re proposing? When an online game publisher sunsets an unsuccessful client-server game, they must publish protocol docs and open source the client and server code?
We never played this game, but presumably someone did, so we should all be upset that it’s closing down…?
Look, I love the site, but it’s hard to recommend to others or consider donating because some of the stories, like this one, are hyperbolic and out of touch.
Re: Stop looking at the trees.
Cause you’re missing the forest.
He’s using Anthem as a microcosm of what happens when a game’s servers are pulled. That game is just gone. Vaporware. Just because it wasn’t popular doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be preserved or converted into a single-player experience. The people who bought the game should still be able to access the content regardless of the servers being pulled.
This dovetails with the Stop Killing Games movement which used The Crew to say that games should be preserved not destroyed once the servers are pulled. Video Game Preservation is not something that is high on the list of priorities at most AAA game studios but it’s part of our rights as consumers for this thing we bought to still be able to function with all it’s content intact and the movement is simply to put in an option to either conver the game into a single-player game or give people the tools to run private servers after sunsetting.
That’s all. That the games YOU BUY should still remain functional after the servers are pulled. You bought the game, you own it and should have the right as a consumer to still be able to play it.
Re: Re: EU law with global benefit
And when the EU passes a law along the lines of the Stop Killing Games petition, gamers worldwide are likely to see the benefits of it. The EU market is too big for game makers to ignore, making regional versions of games is more work than providing the EU-conformant version worldwide.
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“When an online game publisher sunsets an unsuccessful client-server game, they must publish protocol docs and open source the client and server code?”
Yes, why not? The bargain of copyright is that the creator gets a government-backed monopoly for a fixed term and then the work enters the public domain. That second part is just as important as the first.
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I’d recommend reading the link to “Stop Killing Games” in the article, because it lays it out fairly succintly:
“Functional state” is very much up to interpretation, which I believe is intended. In the case of Anthem, releasing server and client software would probably be what fans(however few) would like to see.
Whether stories are hyperbolic and out of touch is something you should let other people decide for themselves.
In my mind, there’s nothing hyperbolic and out of touch about saying “Hey, that game I bought and paid for access to? I’d prefer to continue having access to some form of it even when it’s no longer supported by the developer”.
Re: Re:
I would settle for far less disclosure, if slightly more engineering support.
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The altnerative is linked directly in the article. The Stop Killing Games movement lays this out beautifully.
“When an online game publisher sunsets an unsuccessful client-server game, they must publish protocol docs and open source the client and server code?”
Again, yes, as the Stop Killing Games movement makes clear.
The point I keep coming back to is what copyright law lays out: a limited monopoly in exchange for that same culture to eventually be released into the public domain. If gaming companies are allowed to simply disappear these games, how are they fulfilling their end of the bargain?
They’re not, and that’s the point. I consider this a violation of copyright law, or at least its purpose, and nobody seems to want to do much about it.
Re: Re:
The same should be done for any media that isn’t being sold in a form that’s usable in a modern context. If a book’s been out of print for more than, perhaps, a year: public domain. If a game only runs on an operating system that won’t install on a modern computer: public domain. If the copyright holder has given up on it, why should we allow any legal fiction to the contrary?
Hell, even copyright-monopolist Microsoft has open-sourced GW-BASIC and early MS-DOS. (Not as public domain per se, but under the MIT/Expat license—which requires only that its own text and any copyright notices not be deleted.)
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Why would “publish[ing] protocol docs and open source the client and server code” be a “hyperbolic” alternative to simply shutting down the game?
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Upset is irrelevant.
Yes, code should be provided one way or another.
And it damn well should be deposited, in full, in copyright offices, where it can be retrieved when the copyright dies, at the very least.
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There are alternatives, but if nothing else works, ultimately- yes.
Yes, you should care about things that don’t affect you directly. Especially (but not only) because it might be something you did play, next time.
I find it hard to have sympathy for BioWare as they’ve burned quite a bit of goodwill over the years, promised far too much and delivered far too little with no direction in return. Not to mention a ‘Ship of Theseus’ situation occurred at BioWare as quite a number of the old heads left for greener pastures and the few that came back on only did it for the check and the lack of effort showed.
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That shouldn’t matter.
If they can do it to Anthem, they can do it to games you actually like by studios you actually like as well. As they say, if you can’t stick to your principles when they’re tested, they’re not principles, they’re hobbies.
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How you feel about BioWare is irrelevant in this context though. You won’t be seeing me shedding a tear over BioWare but the fact remains there are people who bought the game and still play it and should still be able to.
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My sympathy is more for the people who paid for a game that will soon become unplayable (regardless of its quality). The audience loses here — not EA or Bioware.
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Not sure where sympathy for BioWare zenters the picture, or why.
The blame should be directed at EA. BioWare is owned by Electronic Arts and just develops the games. EA determines what happens with a game and in case of a shutdown how it happens (and since making it so that fans can operate it costs time and money, oh and it is EA’ intellectual property so EA goes how dare you suggest they sort of put it in the public).
Anthem is just one of three games being shutdown by EA this month.
I’ve just got a fairly simple comment to make.
With Archaeology and Anthropology, we have the ability to mine the past to get a better understanding of how we got here, who we are, and even where we’re going.
With server-based video games, that’s information that will never end up deposited in a layer of rock or tucked away in an old manuscript to be discovered centuries later. Unless people are making video captures of events as they happen and distributing/storing those videos for later public review, the entire social interaction just ceases to exist when the server shuts down.
In fact, I’d argue that this is one of the reasons that Minecraft outlived Mojang and still exists today: anyone can run a server; only the license check goes through the rightsholder. This means the rightsholder has more incentive to keep the game going (free money with only the cost of keeping a licensing server running), and with fans more invested, the number of players stays high enough that the rightsholder has incentive to not only maintain the licenses, but also maintain the server and client code and even make game improvements.
Compare Minecraft to The Sims Online. Both a huge success, both multi-platform, at the end of the day, both similar games in how they’re played/used. Only one of them survives today, and that’s the one where anyone can run their own server. And those servers… they can be very niche, contain lots of mods, or even be snapshots/recreations of the main servers as they existed at a previous point in time. People have even written bots that can take a blank server and populate it with significant historical configurations (like when a fully functional computer was implemented in-game).
It makes me think that copyright should be more like pre-1979 copyright, where you need to submit stuff to a central repository. Sure, it might not be easy to re-create a server from the submitted source code in 30 years when all the dependencies are long obsolete, but it would at least be POSSIBLE.
The current state of being able to enforce your copy right on people with society having no guarantee of having access to the work in the future… it’s untenable over the long term without flagrant violators storing things away. And such people doing such things in spite of the law… well, they’re not going to catch them all.
It's Mine
So I’m in no way a copyright attorney nor do I have a large investment into Anthem, But I did spend my money to play it whenever I wanted to. For EA to unilaterally decide that I cant utilize something I paid for without compensation or the ability to ever use it again is insane to me. Its like buying a tesla, driving it for a few years, then tesla decides to not support that model anymore so it removes the ability to drive it. You paid for it, You technically still have it, but you can never use it again. Granted the Prices are way higher for the tesla but the Argument is still valid, Now I get the servers cost money to maintain but at least give the people a way to make the game public.